pull apart at the seams
by Unstoppable Cyborg
Summary: New Trollmarket is under attack, and Claire isn't sure of what to do. Post Eternal Night, contains gore, dissociation body horror, and violence. Claire-centric. Title comes from a Halsey song.


**I have fics I'm working on, but as I was reading the 13th chapter of Adjustments (by Werepirechick on AO3) the line "Claire thinks she'll tear at the seams if it becomes just that" really got to me and inspired this story.**

* * *

New Trollmarket is under attack. It's only been two months that she's lived here, five months since they defeated Gunmar and Claire sealed _her_ away. It's only been a short amount of time and once again they're fighting.

Or rather, everyone else is fighting. Claire has a wooden staff she uses for practice but it's already snapped. It's not much better than a broom handle, and the weight doesn't balance as naturally as the staff of petrified wood and solidified darkness did.

(It's okay, that staff wasn't good for her.)

(It's not okay, she won it in a battle of wills and even if it wan't good for her she still needed a reliable weapon.)

She doesn't know how to use her clawed armor as a weapon so Claire is trying to help trolls evacuate, not from the market but just from the area that's under attack.

(It's not the Gyre Station. It's not. It's _not_. Things won't go that way, not like the aftermath.)

(Besides, it's not like she can evacuate everyone with her staff anyways.)

Claire feels so _frustrated_ on the sidelines. It's important. It's an important job. There are so many orphaned and injured trolls who need to be taken to safety. But it isn't like it used to be, fighting alongside Blinky and Jim and, well, they aren't here anyways.

(It isn't like it used to be, close enough to go through a portal and grapple.)

Finally, _finally,_ everyone who can't fight is away from it. Except for Claire, she is _running_ to assess the damage. Running and running and she is too late because NotEnrique just got punted like a football. He'll live, he's gotten drop-kicked before.

(Claire's legs ache, not from running but from shame at drop-kicking her brother.)

This wasn't a drop-kick but a smash. The nyarlagroth-like beast is still alive and thrashing every which way, no matter how Jim and Nomura's blades dance across its skin. No matter how many DwärkstonesBlinky throws at it, it lives. It lives and breathes and seeks to destroy the society they're trying to build.

It has fangs, and one of them pierces Jim through his abdomen, dissolving the armor. It then throws Jim to the ground, and he leaves a small crater. He isn't moving.

Claire is moving, and she can't be sure if it's of her own accord. Not because she's possessed, she will **_NEVER_** be possessed again, but because walking, running, leaping, bounding towards Jim feels like she's walking through yet another dissociated haze. There is pressure around her head that tells her that even if she feels like she's trapped in her mind this is all too real.

She runs and she trips over rubble and she yelps in surprise, but she never hits the ground. The beast turns to her.

Claire keeps walking, but she moves too far for each footstep. She can't feel the ground under her feet. All she can feel is fear and rage that is filling her too much, it wants to bust through her seams. Blinky calls out her name because she can't fight, and it's so frustrating because she needs to fight. This need to fight is also pushing at the seams that are located at her eyes and jaw and both her hands.

(That's where she had to stitch herself together last.)

Claire's legs stop moving past each other, but she continues moving, and now she's moving up, ascending to meet the beast.

(She hates this feeling of dissociated levitation but she hates this creature more.)

Claire reaches towards it with both hands and some part of her wonders if she has gone too far, if she can go back. Her veins glow harsh and bright and exactly where she remembers them cracking when she tried to evacuate the Gyre Station, and if the large enough door was a lie then no, it was cracks that the witch slipped through but this is _light_ slipping through Claire. Her face feels hot and it isn't blood that burns in her jaw and around her eyes.

Veins encircle the beast, and Claire knows this not just from Blinky's books but the fact that its veins are glowing just like her own. She funnels that fear and rage and frustration into her veins like they are the staff she used to use. The pressure builds within her, within the beast.

Claire's hands become fists. The pressure becomes unbearable.

Claire wonders if this is what it's like to explode as the veins do the opposite of glow.

The beast's organs fall at the same rate that Claire does.

* * *

Jim wants to yell at her for being so reckless but that makes him a hypocrite.


End file.
